Approval Voting Home Page

Approval voting
is a voting procedure in which voters can vote for, or approve of, as many
candidates as they wish. Each candidate approved of receives one vote,
and the candidate with the most votes wins. It was independently proposed
by several people in the 1970s.

Approval voting has several compelling advantages over other voting procedures:

It is eminently practicable and easy to understand

It will reduce negative campaigning

It will increase voter turnout

It helps elect the strongest candidate

It gives voters flexible and simple options

It will give minority candidates their proper due

Unlike more complicated ranking
systems, which suffer from a variety of theoretical as well as practical
defects, approval voting is simple for voters to understand and use.
It doesn't require redesigning of ballots and is trivial to implement in
vote-counting systems.
Approval voting is used today by various governments and organizations
around the world, including its use by the United Nations to elect the
secretary-general.

Citizens for Approval Voting
is an educational and outreach organization formed in 2003
whose attractive web site provides good information about and arguments for
Approval voting.

There is also a sister political organization
Americans for Approval Voting
which is dedicated to getting Approval Voting adopted for
single officeholder elections in America. I think it is clear that
this would put our democracy on much better footings and I heartily
endorse Americans for Approval Voting.

Read on for more background on voting and evidence for all these claims.

Comparison of voting systems

Single-Winner

When there is just one winner in an election,
a wide array of alternative voting reforms have been put forth. Lest
you get lost in the details, keep in mind that
nearly everyone agrees
that the traditional single-vote-plurality system does the worst job
of picking the candidate that the voters prefer.

The first solidly researched comparison that I saw, which includes
computer simulations based on models of voting behavior, was Making
Multicandidate Elections More Democratic, by Samuel Merrill,
Princeton University Press, 1988. It concludes that the most reliable
systems for meeting the "Condorcet" and "maximum social utility"
criteria are approval voting and the
Instant Runoff Vote (also known
as IRV or Preferential Voting)
and traditional runoff methods. Among these three, approval voting ranks
slightly higher and is much easier to implement. IRV suffers from significant
problems in real life. This was demonstrated in the
2009 Burlington mayoral
contest, where a candidate that clearly beat each other candidate
head-to-head ended up being eliminated early on!

A more recent approach, Range Voting shares many of the advantages of Approval Voting and allows
more nuanced votes, but
makes ballot design and public education somewhat more difficult.

Other methods, such as the
Borda Count
and those based on the
Condorcet tally itself, tend in practice to be vulnerable to "strategic voting".
I.e., voters have incentive to vote insincerely (e.g. punish their
favorite's chief rival with a last-place vote), and the resulting
outcome matches the Condorcet criteria less than methods which
don't reward voters for insincere votes.

Multiple-Winner

When there is more than one winner the
situation is very different. Most countries have a different perspective
on what it actually means to select a legislative body that represents
the people, focusing more on representing viewpoints than geographical areas.
See the
Center for Voting and Democracy
to learn about Proportional Representation.

No matter what voting system is used, it is important for you
to learn about the candidates and issues
(yahoo |
NPR)
and vote!

Boulder Colorado has a long history of interest in alternative voting
systems. It was the second city in the US to implement the
Hare (or Single Transferable Vote) method in 1917 (though it was repealed
in 1947). For a look at what Boulder is doing to further democratic
principles now, spend some time visiting our host system, the
Boulder Community Network.
This site went live in September of 1995.
Last modified: Tue Mar 17 15:58:15 MST 2009
Please send updates and suggestions to:
Neal McBurnett